Thinking about poetry from the point of view of composition and personal reading

Friday, 24 May 2013

Marilyn Hacker: first notes

I think Yeats talked about making a myth of one’s one life. Not to make something
grandious, heroic, but to be able to have a sense of
the whole, the wholeness, of a single life, perhaps especially if the life is
not one of dramatic action or important doings.

Wordsworth make a kind of myth of his own childhood, and
through it a myth about childhood more generally. And he also made the ordinary and the
everyday a worthy subject for poetry.
Marilyn Hacker is also makes poetry, and so a personal mythology of our
times in relation to belonging, exile, Jewishness, gender. She interests me particularly in the way she
gets in touch with these large themes through thinking about her own life and
that of her family and friends, and talking about this life in very ordinary
everyday terms, dealing, as we say, with the quotidian.

Marilyn Hacker writes from a position of where she is in the
quotidian world now. This world is the
world of kitchens, wine with friends, shopping,
conversations, observations of the poor outside her Paris home, thoughts about close friends.

This quotidian themes are placed as quotidian by the way she relates them to wider ideas, often the idea of illness and death, and related to this her own cancer and
friends and parents’ deaths, this
opening into reminiscence in the light of death of friends and parents. Often also she deals with the idea of
home and exile, belonging and non
belonging. This theme opens out into her
constant awareness of her movement in cities not of her origin, mainly Paris
and London, and related to this she is
aware of her Jewishness and the Nazi
atrocities (history). She is also a
‘stranger’ in her gender, feminism, leftism, and lesbianism. She writes in sympathy with black American
poets, and poets writing in Arab against their various dictators and invaders. The
theme of home in exile extends to friends who also don’t quite fit in
neatly. As the poor around her don’t and
yet do belong to their own country. Her
poems are set in this quotidian world
in the sense that often they represent setting,
places, weather, houses, rooms,
parks, and particularly family histories.

The poems themselves are quotidian in tone in the sense that
they are not dramatic or ringingly ‘passionate’, though they are
passionate. They send more often than not
like letters shared by others like ‘sharing’ thoughts as intimate as, and often
similar to, journal entries.

But in all this the quotidian and the first person are put
to the service of something other than the quotidian and the first person, the wider
themes of racial prejudice, American
involvement in wars, death felt in this very everydayness. They are often apparently casually
constructed almost always ending in a non-climax type of resonance.

Hacker manages to incorporate the wider problems of politics
and society into the way she talks about her own or friends personal
experiences. And she does it also
through her translations of other committed poets.

The forms she uses are, at first sight, ‘conventional’ in
the sense that she uses forms such as the sonnet, and rhyme, and metrical
lines. When asked about this, and
about the alleged unpopularity of ‘form’ in American poetry, she points out
that all poems have ‘form’, and that there are plenty of American poets, and
indeed radical politically aware poets who used metrical forms. She doesn’t uses metres with a pre-conceived
ideological ‘point’ in mind, but, as she said, ‘hedonistically’, because like
all poets she enjoys the engagement with the touch and sound and resistance of
language. But her use of metre by no
means implies that her poems are linguistically straightforward. By no means.
They often require a very careful reading if we are to get right into them.